CHAPTER XV
THEY were playing that latest novelty from
across the water ‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of
compassion and tenderness, pierced like a revelation from heaven, pierced like
the angel’s treacly dart into the holy Teresa’s quivering and ecstasiated
flank. More ripely and roundly, with a
kindly and less agonizing voluptuousness, the ‘cello meditated those Mohammedan
ecstasies that last, under the green palms of
At
each recurrence of the refrain the four negroes of the orchestra, or at least
the three of them who played with their hands alone – for the saxophonist
always blew at this point with a redoubled sweetness, enriching the passage
with a warbling contrapuntal soliloquy that fairly wrung the entrails and
transported the pierced heart – broke into melancholy and drawling song:
‘What’s
he to Hecuba?
Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday
week,
Way down in old
‘What
unspeakable sadness,’ said Gumbril, as he stepped, stepped through the
intricacies of the trot. ‘Eternal passion, eternal pain. Les
chants désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux, Et
j’en suis d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots. Rum tiddle-um-tum, pom-pom. Amen.
What’s he to Hecuba? Nothing at all. Nothing,
mark you. Nothing,
nothing.’
‘Nothing,’
repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I know all about
that.’ She sighed.
‘I
am nothing to you,’ said Gumbril, gliding with skill between the wall and the
Charybdis of a couple dangerously experimenting with a new step. ‘You are nothing to me. Thank God.
And yet here we are, two bodies with but a single thought, a beast with
two backs, a perfectly united centaur trotting, trotting.’ They trotted.
‘What’s
he to Hecuba?’ The grinning blackamoors
repeated the question, reiterated the answer on a tone of frightful
unhappiness. The saxophone warbled on
the verge of anguish. The couples
revolved, marked time, stepped and stepped with an
habitual precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly
significant rite. Some were in fancy
dress, for this was a gala night at the cabaret. Young women disguised as callipygous
Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondolies, black-breeched Toreadors circulated,
moon-like, round the hall, clasped sometimes in the arms of Arabs, or white
clowns, or more often of untravestied partners.
The faces reflected in the mirrors were the sort of faces one feels one
ought to know by sight; the cabaret was ‘Artistic’.
‘What’s
he to Hecuba?’
Mrs
Viveash murmured the response, almost piously, as though she were worshipping
almighty and omnipresent Nil. ‘I adore
this tune,’ she said, ‘this divine tune.’
It filled up a space, it moved, it jigged, it set things twitching in
you, it occupied time, it gave you a sense of being
alive. ‘Divine tune, divine tune,’ she
repeated with emphasis, and she shut her eyes, trying to abandon herself,
trying to float, trying to give Nil the slip.
‘Ravishing
little Toreador, that,’ said Gumbril, who had been following the black-breeched
travesty with affectionate interest.
Mrs
Viveash opened her eyes. Nil was
unescapable. ‘With Piers Cotton, you
mean? Your tastes are a little common,
my dear Theodore.’
‘Green-eyed monster!’
Mrs
Viveash laughed. ‘When I was being
“finished” in
‘Hush,’
said Gumbril. They were abreast of the
Toreador and her partner. Piers Cotton
turned his long greyhound’s nose in their direction.
‘How
are you?’ he asked across the music.
‘They
nodded. ‘And you?’
‘Ah, writing such a book,’ cried Piers Cotton, ‘such a brilliant,
brilliant, flashing book.’ The
dance was carrying them apart. ‘Like a
smile of false teeth,’ he shouted across the widening gulf, and disappeared in
the crowd.
‘What’s
he to Hecuba?’ Lachrymosely, the
hilarious blackamoors chanted their question, mournfully pregnant with its
foreknown reply.
Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter. Nil in the shape of a
black-breeched moon-basined Toreador.
Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose. Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in the form of a divine
tune. Nil, the faces, the faces
one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm
is round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all.
That’s
why there’ll be no wedding. No wedding
at
‘Always
the same people,’ complained Mrs Viveash, looking round the room. ‘The old familiar faces. Never anyone new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?’
‘I’m
not responsible for them,’ said Gumbril.
‘I’m not even responsible for myself.’
He imagined a cottagey room, under a roof, with a window near the floor
and a sloping ceiling where you were always bumping your head; and in the
candlelight Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and happy mouth; in the darkness,
the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.
‘Why
don’t they come and sing for their supper?’ Mrs Viveash went on
petulantly. ‘It’s their business to
amuse us.’
‘They’re
probably thinking of amusing themselves,’ Gumbril suggested.
‘Well,
then, they should do it where we can see them.’
‘What’s
he to Hecuba?’
‘Nothing
at all,’ Gumbril clownishly sang. The
room, in the cottage, had nothing to do with him. He breathed Mrs Viveash’s memories of Italian
jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth hair. ‘Nothing at all.’ Happy clown!
Way
down in old